President Donald Trump pauses during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2018, with members of congress to discuss school and community safety. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Editor’s note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today’s headlines.

Speaking at a rally this Saturday in Pennsylvania, President Trump once again raised the idea of executing drug dealers as a solution to the nation’s drug problems.

It’s an idea Trump has mentioned before, including two weeks ago at a White House meeting on the opioid crisis. “Some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty,” he said. “And, by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do. So we’re going to have to be very strong on penalties.”

While he didn’t call for the death penalty in his State of the Union address, he did call for getting “much tougher on drug dealers and pushers.”

Trump has also privately praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” in his country. That “unbelievable job” has consisted of human rights violations and the killing of more than 12,000 people.

But this approach of doubling down and even escalating the failed War on Drugs, nearly half a century since Nixon first declared it, won’t save lives, won’t stop people from using drugs and won’t stop people from dealing drugs.

To take even the absurd idea of following in the footsteps of authoritarian countries with the death penalty on the books for drug offenses, it has to be pointed out that there’s little evidence the death penalty actually deters drug trafficking.

In Southeast Asia, where many countries have long used the death penalty for drug offenses, opium cultivation has grown unabated over the past decade, while the region remains a major center for synthetic drug production. Meanwhile, countries like Iran and Singapore have eased on the practice in recent years, perhaps recognizing the futility of the practice.

While the impulse of the authoritarian is to look at the drug problem and see a need to cage and kill people to stop people from using and abusing drugs, one model we might want to consider is that of Portugal. As Jeffrey Singer of the Cato Institute recently pointed out, “Portugal’s drug usage rates are now among the lowest in the European Union, and drug-related pathologies such as sexually-transmitted disease are markedly down, as are drug-related crimes.”

Portugal didn’t achieve these outcomes by throwing more people in prison or executing more people, but rather by decriminalizing drugs in 2001.

Rather than treat drug use as a criminal justice issue, Portugal addresses it as a public health matter. Instead of being thrown in prison, drug users who receive citations could receicve drug treatment, or, alternatively, they could receive a fine or no sanction at all, depending on the particular circumstances.

This approach not only doesn’t require executing people, but it has been proven to yield desirable outcomes. It also doesn’t require the sort of mass incarceration the United States indulges in, to the disproportionate detriment of poor, black and Hispanic Americans.

As newly released research from the Pew Charitable Trusts makes clear, there’s no association between imprisoning more drug offenders and lower rates of drug use, drug arrests or drug overdoses. “The findings,” the report notes, “reinforce a large body of prior research that cast doubt on the theory that stiffer prison terms deter drug misuse, distribution, and other drug-law violations.”

Branding millions of Americans with criminal records for drug offenses, imprisoning hundreds of thousands of drug offenders on any given day and arresting another person every 20 seconds for drug crimes hasn’t made us a drug free society. It has only made the opioid crisis worse, wasted a trillion dollars and made life harder for millions of Americans.

Trump would be better off taking his own advice in 1990 when he called for drug legalization.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

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